Richard Morrison

Here are the ten concert works that scare the living daylights out of me

So what gives you the creeps? I mean, excluding politicians, bankers, estate agents and journalists – the four tribes that always top surveys of ‘most detested professions’.

Let’s stick to music. Elsewhere in this issue, Ashutosh Khandekar surveys the spookiest scenes in opera. Fair enough, but in opera the composer gets a helping hand from the terror inherent in the drama. The same is true of film music. I could fill this column with a discussion of just one composer’s soundtracks for one film director – Bernard Hermann’s scores for Alfred Hitchcock, and especially his avant-garde use of strings (and, remarkably, just strings) in Psycho. Yet here again the composer is really heightening terrifying scenes that already exist. I’m not belittling that art. But creating a mood of terror in the concert hall – where music is the only thing happening – is, to my mind, even more notable. So here are ten nonoperatic, non-cinematic pieces that chill my spine.

I start in Russia, or more specifically the Soviet Union, where composers who survived Stalin’s Great Terror sometimes bravely sought to evoke it in music, even if it endangered their lives. That was certainly the case with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which he wisely withdrew before it (and he) could be condemned. The whole work is a testament of terror, but the bit that always brings me out in a cold sweat (as I’m sure it does string players who have to perform it) is the wild fugue that comes out of nowhere, like a whirlwind, in the first movement.

Prokofiev was more circumspect. His Fifth Symphony, premiered in 1945, was supposedly about victory in war, yet the work ends with two minutes of sheer, mechanistic frenzy that suggest to me a vast killing machine out of control and unstoppable. Stalin’s, not Hitler’s.

From the same period, though more about an individual’s journey to hell rather than a nation’s, is the Dirge from Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. This, too, is a string fugue that suddenly acquires a primeval force when the horn enters – like a blast from the Day of Judgement. These days, even the Catholic Church doesn’t talk much about damnation and hellfire. Yet I defy anyone to listen to this music and not believe, if only momentarily, that we will all pay for our sins in the end.

Talking of Catholicism brings me to my only terrifying choice by a living composer. It’s James Macmillan’s

1990 masterpiece The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, depicting the supposed torture and execution of a 17th-century woman accused of witchcraft. The way Macmillan writes it, one feels that not a single death but thousands of acts of torture have been concentrated into a few horrific minutes of orchestral music. It frightens me much more than, say, the melodramatic posturing of the Witches’ Sabbath in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. That said, I include in my ten pieces another depiction of a witches’ sabbath: Musorgsky’s Night on

Bare Mountain, preferably in Rimskykorsakov’s hair-raising version.

To turn from that to Purcell’s Funeral Music might seem like stepping from a boiling cauldron to a limpid stream.

Yet there’s something about the way Purcell’s phrases gently rise and fall that fills me with a kind of mortal trepidation. They so perfectly epitomise the fragility of existence.

Two Sixth Symphonies make it into my Terror Top Ten. How could one not include Mahler’s, with its three hammer-blows of fate, the third one removed by the superstitious composer? Vaughan Williams’s is less often played but, to my ears, it’s an astonishing chronicle of existential fear in the posthiroshima age.

You don’t necessarily need a vast orchestra to evoke dread. In the last movement of Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1, subtitled ‘From My Life’, a sustained high E harmonic in the first violin part depicts the onset of the tinnitus that was as terrifying to Smetana as deafness had been to Beethoven. The fact that he found a way of conveying his inner torment so graphically in music is the ultimate tribute to his genius.

Lastly, an organ piece: the macabre Toccata that concludes Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique. Corny it may be – like a grotesque dance of sinister gargoyles in a cathedral after dark – yet it still affects me like a recurring nightmare. Perhaps, though, that’s because it reminds me of an actual recurring nightmare: boyhood organ lessons with a very stern tutor when I hadn’t practised for a week. Now that’s true terror.

Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique still a ects me like a recurring nightmare